Announcing the GS-Series: Adding Premium Storage Support to the Largest VMs in the Public Cloud

The cloud makes hyper-scale computing possible and with Azure, we provide your applications unmatched scale. You can instantly scale out your application to 100s of virtual machines (VMs) spanning geographies, or you can scale up your application by running them on powerful and unparalleled VMs. Earlier this year, we launched the G-series VMs, offering more memory and local SSD space than any VM size in the public cloud, which lets you add more ‘scale up’ power to your application.

Today we’re excited to announce a variant of G-series, the GS-series, which combines the compute power of G-series with the performance of Premium Storage to create powerful VMs for your most storage and compute intensive applications. Powered by the Intel Xeon E5 v3 family processors, the GS-series can have up to 64TB of storage, provide 80,000 IOPs (storage I/Os per second) and deliver 2,000 MB/s of storage throughput. The GS-series offers the highest disk throughput, by more than double, of any VM offered by any other hyperscale public cloud provider. Furthermore, both the G-series and GS-series offer up to 20 Gbps of network bandwidth, more than double that of the closest VMs of any hyperscale public cloud provider.

GS-series are ideal for applications that are both compute and storage intensive. Relational databases like SQL Server and mySQL, noSQL databases like MongoDB, and data warehouses can all have significant performance gains when run on GS-series. You can also use GS-series to significantly scale up the performance of enterprise applications such as Exchange and Dynamics.

To see the power of GS-series in action on both Windows and Linux, watch Mark Russinovich’s video below:

GS-series sizes, listed below, are available in every region the G-series sizes are available, including West US, East US 2 and West Europe.

Size

Cores

Memory

Max Disk IOPS

Max Disk Bandwidth

(MB per second)

Standard_GS1

2

28

5,000

125

Standard_GS2

4

56

10,000

250

Standard_GS3

8

112

20,000

500

Standard_GS4

16

224

40,000

1,000

Standard_GS5

32

448

80,000

2,000

We are excited about the tremendous customer adoption of G-series to date, with more than 50% growth in usage in the last three months.

D-Series and DS-Series Price Cuts, VM Diagnostic Support and Service Bus Premium Messaging

While the GS-series will provide you the largest VMs and the fastest storage in the public cloud, the D-series and DS-series in Azure provide a good combination of CPU performance, memory and local SSD for most common workloads. We’re continuously striving to make these more accessible at lower price points, and are pleased to announce today that we’re reducing the prices on D-series and DS-series instances by as much as 27%. The price changes will take effect on October 1st. These price reductions are just one of the many ways we’re working to make Azure the best choice for your business.

In addition to our VM updates, we are also excited to announce a new diagnostic capability for VMs – the ability to see serial and console output from a running Virtual Machine. This will help customers diagnose VMs that may be suffering from boot or runtime failures.

Finally, we constantly strive to better support a broader array of mission critical cloud applications and today, we are introducing Azure Service Bus Premium Messaging, a new Service Bus tier that provides all the messaging features of Azure Service Bus queues and topics with predictable, repeatable performance and improved availability. Unlike the multitenant model used by basic and standard Service Bus tiers, the premium tier uses a micro services model to provide resource isolation and consistent performance.